26 Years Later, Google Earth Helps Lost Indian Boy Go Home

By David Vranicar
Oct 16, 2013 3:25 PM PT

Indian Saroo Munshi Khan used Google Earth to track down his long-lost family 26 years after accidentally falling asleep on a train.

In a tale that's almost too Hollywood to believe, then 5-year-old Saroo reportedly took a break from searching for change with his brother in Berhanpur, India, and hopped onto a stationary train where he fell asleep. Hours later, he woke up in Calcutta, alone and more than 900 miles away from home. He was taken to an orphanage and adopted by an Australian family.

A few years ago, Saroo used Google Earth's "ruler" feature to take a stab at figuring out how far he had traveled on that fateful day. After hours upon hours of scouring, he spotted a neighborhood that looked right.

Confident -- or at least as confident as he could be -- he made the trek home in 2012, talked to locals, and eventually found his mother, brother and sister.

'Snoopers' Charter' Fails to Pass in UK

A former Labour party cabinet minister has warned Britain's intelligence community that it appears to be conducting mass surveillance without Parliamentary consent.

The warning comes after the coalition government failed to pass a communications data bill, dubbed the "Snoopers' Charter" by detractors, that would have given Britain's data cops greater power to collect and hoard information.

The bill was knocked down by Liberal Democrats, however, who feared it was a violation of privacy.